The next morning, I opened the newspaper just a crack…according to Stanley, I had grown “downright scary”： “America’s girl next door has morphed into the mercurial diva down the hall. At the first sound of her peremptory voice and clickety stiletto heels, people dart behind doors and douse the lights.”
Media types ate up the clickety-stilettos line. Stanley went on to point out that our lead over GMA had shrunk from 2 million viewers down to 270,000—which, she seemed to say, was mostly my fault.
That night, I was emceeing a Conservation International gala at Tom Brokaw’s request. It was a swishy affair packed with New York intelligentsia—probably all of whom had read the piece, mouths agape, in their town cars that morning. As I walked up to the microphone, I felt completely exposed. I just had to tell myself that most of the machers in that room had received their own share of bad press along the way. When you reach a certain level, the occasional takedown is to be expected. But reading mean things about myself never got easier.
What did help （a little） was understanding the huge role gender played in all of this. The short version: For so long, women were expected to be warm, friendly, nurturing. Meanwhile, to make it professionally, you have to be assertive, competitive, decisive—so-called male traits. When a woman dares to exhibit those traits by pushing her team to perform, demanding excellence and being ambitious for herself, it’s seen as scarily norm-busting. Her punishment? She’s called a ballbuster, an ice queen, or, in my case, a diva （I find it curious that there’s no male equivalent for that word）。 Apparently, friendly and warm don’t track with strong and competent. You’re one or the other. You’re either the cute girl who does features or the serious one who covers the Pentagon. You’re either Katie or Katherine.
It bothered me that my fiercest critic was a woman. My dad used to say, “Women are their own worst enemies.”
I often wonder about my part in this. While I took female writers, researchers, and producers under my wing, I was way less welcoming when a charismatic female correspondent entered my sphere. There were only a few coveted spots for women—I felt like I had to protect my turf. The system was run by men, and I knew the brain wasn’t always the organ guiding their decisions. Case in point: One executive openly raved about the “bee-stung lips” of an anchor he wanted to hire, fantasizing about how sexy she’d look in a safari jacket while covering some war.
The fact that my mother kept such a close eye on my competition didn’t help. “Who’s that girl?” she’d say whenever someone sat in for me. “Why are they using her? She’s trying to be like you.” Getting territorial on my behalf, she made me even more paranoid.
All About Eve was never far from my thoughts, and I’d moved into Margo Channing territory: Someone younger and cuter was always around the corner. For a minute there, Ashleigh Banfield was the next big thing; I’d heard through the grapevine her father was telling anyone who’d listen that she was going to replace me. In that environment, mentorship sometimes felt like self-sabotage.
The idyllic phase where I could do no wrong was officially over. Although in terms of office politics, I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.
56
One Big-Ass Rabbit
I ALWAYS LIKED LES Moonves, even though he was a close-talker with bad breath. I first met him in 1994 when he was head of Warner Bros. I’d been dispatched to LA to do a segment from the set of ER, the biggest show on TV at the time. That meant touring the County General set with sexy Dr. Doug Ross, aka an ascendant George Clooney. （It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.） Then I visited the next soundstage over, where Les introduced me to the cast of a promising new show about six young, single Manhattanites. One of them, an actress with a fetching bob and a cute smile, said she was so excited to meet me—Jennifer Aniston before she became Jennifer Aniston.
Years later I ran into Les at a Knicks game. He came over, gave me a hug, and said, “If you walk down the aisle with that guy”—Tom Werner—“I’ll be the first one to say, ‘I object!’” Apparently, the bad blood stemmed from Les’s abrupt cancellation of Tom’s sitcom Cybill （years later, the show’s star, Cybill Shepherd, would allege that Les pulled the plug shortly after she’d rebuffed his sexual advances, but I digress）。
My taste in boyfriends hadn’t prevented Les from pursuing me professionally over the years. Now, with my NBC contract set to expire in a matter of months, he was feeling out my agent, Alan Berger: Would Katie be interested in anchoring the CBS Evening News?